Amber Run unveil intense video for 'Stranger' - premiere

Ahead of the release of their second album For A Moment, I Was Lost, Amber Run have put out a video for their single 'Stranger', which we're premiering today on The Independent.

The band says of the song: "It's about reconnecting with the thing you love most and remembering that nothing that's worth having comes easy."

Watch the video below:

Q&A with Amber Run

What made you pick 'Stranger' as the album opener?

We feel like it's a good representation of where we are as a band now, and that it's a step forward for us lyrically and musically.

This album is so much darker than the last and as soon as we wrote the song we knew it had to be the first track people heard. It was one of the first songs we wrote for the album, if not the first, and subconsciously I think the song inspired the sound and character of the rest of the album.

What was the process of writing/recording this album compared to the first?

We wrote the first album over several years, so there's some disparity between the songs themselves. Some we wrote when we were 16 or 17 and some we wrote when we were 21.

The songs on this record were all written in the last year, so they capture a moment for us as individuals and as a band. For 5AM, most of the songs were 'road tested' on tour, and so were fully refined by the time we went into the studio. This time round, the majority of the songs were sort of pieced together in the studio when we were writing them, and half the time we didn't really know how we wanted the end product to sound.

We would come up with the parts while actually recording them, rather than writing them in a room. The thing is, we then had to learn to play them as a band because we planned to record the whole album live. In doing that I think some songs became far stronger and other songs which we had loved before, we soon realised weren't right for the album. We essentially did the whole thing backwards but it seemed to work!

What targets did you set yourself with this album?

We want to tour overseas. Inexplicably we haven't been able to yet but that's the number one priority. We would love to get to the US but we also know we have to tackle it at the right time.

Beyond that for us we just want to keep building steadily as a band. The bands that really inspire us are the bands who get better and better with every album and build their fanbase over time, not just on the first record. It's important for us to not get ahead of ourselves.

Was it an ordeal to make the video? Any non-swimmers?

A little bit but it was a completely new experience. There were shots where we had to be held face up underwater while very aware that our noses and throats were filling up with water.

There are also the shots where we fall straight back into water - you might do it as a laugh at some point but I can tell you, back flopping into water over and over is both unnatural and really painful. Joe was waterboarded for half an hour only for the shots not to make the final cut. Lucky boy. Fortunately we are all swimmers...

Amber Run's new album For A Moment, I Was Lost is due for release in 2017